Last year at this time I was looking for the lowest cost Plex Server to use in my Camper to serve up movies to my three TVs. Here’s the link to the original post if anyone is interested: Best Plex Device for Offline use? - #9 by ShawnMTierney
At the time I decided to go with a new $99 Raspberry Pi 4B, and this turned out to be a big mistake.
Towards the end of camping season I resorted to using the file browser in the PI’s OS to launch movies, as Plex Pi never worked right for me either locally or on the network.
Fast forward a year and I’m now using the $199 nVidia Shield. I tested over the winter and it worked great both locally and across the network.
The only problem I ran into setting it up this weekend is it wanted to connect to the internet to connect to the local hard drive, so I turned on my phone’s hotspot for a few minutes to get Plex to boot up, and afterwards it seemed to work even when I turned my hotspot off.
tl;dr - I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, questions, answers, etc on this as I know there is more to learn on this topic!
My experience is that the most consistent offline experience can be achieved with a signed-out (unclaimed) server: Server Settings → General → Sign Out. Then, ensure the following settings are configured:
Include your local network in Settings → Network (Show Advanced) → List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth.
You’ll likely need to restart Plex Media Server after making this changes.
I’ve tested in the past with Android and Roku clients and, when opened as Guest (also signed out of your account) in conjunction with the server settings above, your server should be shown in the “More…” section in the side panel (where you can then pin it).
The drawback to this configuration is that no Plex Pass features will be available; however, since you don’t appear to be a subscriber, it doesn’t matter.
Keep in mind that this does pose a potential security risk as anyone on your local network can access your Plex server as admin in this configuration. So you’ll want to ensure that your network is isolated from the outside world and that only folks you trust may access it.
If you do login your server and clients they will want to periodically phone home to check various things, including your Plex Pass subscription status to enable any additional features to which you may be entitled.
There’s a post floating around the forums somewhere which describes how to configure your signed-in server and clients to somewhat mitigate this, but my experience is that there are cases where those instructions can still leave you with no access to your server if you have no Internet connection.
